While purging some obsolete files in my computer’s hard drive last night, I happened across a composition from April 16 of 2009, that I had decided to “sleep on” before posting it on this blog, then I never again remembered to take action on. Ensuing events have made portions of it less relevant, but the “essence” of it seems to apply to what I feel has become an underlying theme of this thread:

TOPIC: Taxes, assessments, lawmakers’ hypocrisy and tea parties.

Citizens of Middletown:

I feel remiss in not having initiated a “tea party” right here in our very own city in concert with those held throughout our great nation yesterday.

Not only do we have the same grievances against our ever-increasingly overbearing Federal government, including lawmakers and politicians of BOTH parties, as the rest of our fellow Americans, but I believe that we here in Middletown have the same, and perhaps even more egregious, grievances against our local government.

Our children and grandchildren are deeply in debt for projects that have served only a few, and for visions that have not only failed, but continue to be followed with no change in prospects for success. Our leaders talk only to the so-called “stakeholders” regarding how to spend public funds, without regard to the cost to us, the “bag-holders”, and our children.

We have lawmakers making ordinances that they themselves do not follow. We have lawmakers supporting the assessment for improvements of other citizens’ property even while the same lawmakers are failing to pay legal existing assessments on their very own properties. We have lawmakers proposing and supporting property tax increases while at the very same time they are in arrears on the property taxes on their own Middletown properties.

We are continually preached to about the necessity of a higher City payroll tax, yet I doubt that every City of Middletown public official and public employee that has, or has had within the last ten years, employees of their own (or has, or has had, any interest in any business entity that has, or has had, employees in the City of Middletown) could swear under penalty of law that they have been, and currently are, in strict compliance with all statutory federal, state, and local withholding requirements. Similar statements could probably be made about several local non-profit organizations and their books, or lack thereof.

The time has come, fellow citizens, and the time is now. The time is upon us. We can no longer tolerate “business as usual” in the City of Middletown. We must call for investigations into not only groups that seem to be above the law, but also individuals, and purge them from our city government one way or another, sending them to prison if we must. They must go--willingly or unwillingly--but go they must!

Those in our city government that have knowledge of such scoundrels or such scandalous behavior, though they may not directly be guilty of it themselves, but who do not reveal it or refuse to cooperate in exposing it are not innocent. If they are not with us, they are against us.

There must be no negotiations, no ifs, ands or buts. Anyone supposedly “innocent” but with knowledge of wrongdoing must come forward to help, for if they do not, they are no better than the guilty and they deserve no further consideration, no severance, no “deal” of any kind.

Middletonians, it is time to take back our city!